649: Prove It With Cameras
22 Jul 2025Our broken and drowned electronics, Apple’s lawsuit against Prosser, Cloudflare’s power exercise, and Marco’s solution to sunscreen.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: Casey did Marco’s favorite thing
- CalDigit TS5+ (affiliate link)
- CalDigit TS5+ (product page)
iperf3
- Follow-up:
- F1 (the sport, not the movie)
- Apple expected to win 🇺🇸 rights
- John’s video != Casey’s immersive ride-along
- To see the immersive ride-along, you need to be wearing a Vision Pro; scroll down on that link
- John’s toaster update
- AirPods & AppleCare+
- Reverting to “normal” tabs in Tahoe (via ST-S)
defaults write -g NSSolariumWindowTabs -bool NO
- Low-cost Apple laptop with A18 Pro
- F1 (the sport, not the movie)
- Apple sues leaker Jon Prosser for stealing iOS secrets
- Cloudflare Declares Content Independence Day
- Press release
- ChangeDetection.io
- Stratechery (paywalled)
- Post-show: Marco solved sunscreen
- John’s hat that he likes
- John’s hat that is cheaper but that he likes less
- 🇯🇵 Skin Aqua Super Moisture UV Gel (eBay)
- 🇪🇺 La Roche-Posay Anthelios UVmune 400 Invisible Fluid, Non-Perfumed (eBay)
- Australian sunscreen video
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Is copying Apple hardware a good idea?
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Chapters
- Casey bought something
- F1® Follow-Up®
- John’s toaster update
- Marco’s Verizon update
- Casey’s AirPods update
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- Tahoe-tab hack
- A18-laptop ideas
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Apple sues John Prosser
- Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers
- Ending theme
- Marco solved sunscreen
Casey bought something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve done Marco’s favorite thing in the entire world. You’ve bought something? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Well, so it’s both your sarcastic. It was a sarcasm. Well, I meant it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sarcastic, but it’s actually also genuine. I did buy something, which is Marco’s favorite thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your least favorite thing is that literally 50 minutes ago, I basically tore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apart my entire desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, if any of this recording works and or if I sound even remotely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent, success. Success, but who knows? If I sound like garbage, it’s not Marco’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not John’s fault, it’s my fault. Playing the third party RAM. No, it’s not third party RAM, not this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I finally, just this evening, I finally received the shipment of the CalDigit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TS5 Plus that I had ordered a couple of weeks back. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very excited. I have only used it for a few minutes and my initial review is it’s just like the TS4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with faster ethernet and a few more ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, so you didn’t really change anything. You just swapped out one component with the component that does the
⏹️ ▶️ John same job made by the same company with one bigger number at the end?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but it doesn’t sound as dramatic that way, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John see how dramatic it is. All I can say is you sound fine over Zoom, so worst case scenario, we can use that backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds good. I mean, initially, it seems like it’s pretty nice. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, there seem to be a few more ports in the back. There is gigabit ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is exciting, or excuse me, 10 gigabit ethernet. The TS4 had two and a half gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ethernet. That being said, I did a quick Iperf3 speed test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the Synology and my Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was not as impressive as I would have hoped, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I have old wires between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and my Switch. Oh, actually, and I might not even be on, no, I think I am on a 10 gigabit port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Switch. But nevertheless, I have some playing to do, but I didn’t have time before the recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, initial results are this extraordinarily overpriced, well, maybe not overpriced, extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, costly, is that the Merlinism? This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey costly CalDigit dock is very nice. And I might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reselling my TS4 to a local friend. But if not, and you’re interested in one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel free to reach out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So have you considered the possibility that the Synology hard drives can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually serve 1.2 gigabytes per second?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have. And that’s a very, very good point. I don’t think I have anything else that’s 10 gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the moment, though. Like my Mac Mini is an M1 Mac Mini. It has just straight up gigabit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one gigabit Ethernet. I guess I could, I’m just trying, I’m struggling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to theorize a way I could do this test any better. And I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you that the hard drives may be the issue here, not the, not the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like if you put like some kind of, I mean, I’m sure there’s some Synology app that basically is like, you know, a network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance thing where it just sends data, you know, from nothing over the internet or over the network. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just do that with a
⏹️ ▶️ John shell script yourself if you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought Iperf3 did that, but I don’t know enough about it to know one way or the other. So I am talking outside my comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zone at this point. Um, but yeah, I got a fiddle with it. And again, it could be any one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of several different things. It could be the hard drives are too slow. There’s like 7,200 RPM hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that is the hard. If you’re doing sequential reads from a giant Media file with all especially in the
⏹️ ▶️ John initial like the initial speed when you do it a couple times And it gets into like the caches and everything. I think you should be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine I think you should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean you’re talking about again 1.2 gigabytes per second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Being read off of a collection of ancient hard drives that are in some kind of rate arrangement And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know rate any raid that does not include you know a 1 and a 0 is slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very very slow And so it would not surprise me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if actually all of these like, you know old presumably SATA connected hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t actually deliver 1.2 gigabytes of streaming data over the network.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forgot that you don’t have any You know, even your backups aren’t raid 0. I think we’ve talked about this before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They used to be in the 8-base analogy But I’m I don’t think I’m even doing time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if I am I know that’s what I was I’m doing a single standalone hard drive, if I recall correctly, as Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Machine. And so there’s no redundancy or striping or splitting of any sort.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, this is breaking news. I have testing to do. This could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cabling. It could be the fact that my tests are flawed because of what I’m testing against. There’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different issues here, many of which start and end with me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t think that— A story of my life. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story of my life, for sure. So yeah, so I’m not clear what the weak link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, but it’s probably me. But yeah, I mean, the chat room is justifiably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thankfully not in a rude way saying, well, why bother go from four to five?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a good reason. This was a little bit of a Marco purchase, especially since it is $500. It is a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the good news is I had already spent money on a plane ticket to WWDC that I ended up getting refunded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had a credit on my credit card. So that makes it free, right? I’m not sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money works, but okay. No, that’s exactly how money works. Come on, Marco, defend me here. That’s like business write-offs. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just free, right? Right. But either way, I really wanted 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit Ethernet so that, you know, I can go between the Synology and me faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I was before. And rather than getting a bespoke 10 gigabit Ethernet, I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say card, but I guess thing, I can’t think of the word I’m looking for. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so- Dongle. dongle adapter, thank you, et cetera. I just upgraded the CalDigit. And it is worth noting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m using this, and this could also be another part of the problem. I’m using this on an M3 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro, which is Thunderbolt 4, and everything is working, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not as much bandwidth as it would have if I had a M.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. That’s 40 gigabits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? I would think as well, but also I have two different 5K monitors connected to it, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So many of these problems could be me. I think what I’m already hearing though, Marco, I hope you picked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up what I was just putting down. The only solution to this problem, the clear answer to this problem is to upgrade my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro when the M5 comes out. That’s the only answer, right, Marco? Because I need that Thunderbolt 5,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get a Mac Pro, so you can hook up the two 5K monitors to the Mac and not worry about it taking your bandwidth. It’s got a dedicated 10
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gig ethernet port. There you go. Yeah, perfect. Someday when
⏹️ ▶️ John they release a good Mac Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a Mac Mini that has 10 gig ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very true, exactly. But anyways, but yeah, so far, two thumbs up you’re willing to spend an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extraordinary amount of money on something that in my case is marginally frivolous. But hey, here’s what we’re going to do. I put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an affiliate link in the show notes, so all of you can buy one and then I’ll get like a dollar from each of you. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough of you buy it, I’ll be rich. That’s what we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. So after this amazing review, you spent $500 to sort of maybe increase something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit. That’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I do have more ports. It really legitimately does have more parts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Future-proofing. He won’t need to buy the six. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a hundred dollars per port though. Stop it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco. You’re supposed to be on my side, remember? You’re getting this all wrong.
F1® Follow-Up®
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, let’s do some follow-up. And last episode, John and I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a review of F1 the movie that stars Brad Pitt. We talked about that in the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, the post show and a little bit in the bootleg as well, or overtime or something. I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly where it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the bootleg. A couple people asked about that, but as I said, I was going to talk about spoiler stuff. We didn’t do it in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it in the bootleg. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to get all the bits, the bootleg has everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s pronounced boatleg. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, indeed. Yes. But anyways, one of the things I forgot to bring up last episode was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s rumored F1 deals. So, let me set the stage. With Formula
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, ESPN, which is a sports network that’s based here in America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pretty much every cable package includes it, or most cable packages include it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are the carrier of F1 in the States. However, they just basically regurgitate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it’s Sky Sports from the UK. So they take the UK feed and just blast it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out through ESPN. And that’s been the case since I’ve been paying attention to F1 for like five years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well reading from, I think this is Mac Rumors, forgive me, I don’t have it in front of me. Yes, Mac Rumors. Apple is expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to win the rights to stream Formula One races on Apple TV Plus in the United States thanks to a $150
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million bid, Business Insider reports. The rights to broadcast Formula One in the United States are currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey held by Disney’s ESPN. According to sources familiar with negotiations, Disney is apparently unwilling to match or beat Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer. It pays, Disney that is, pays around 85 million per year for its current rights, just over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple’s latest bid. I think this is really interesting and really exciting. I, as someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already committed to Apple TV+, I think this is great. If I wasn’t committed to Apple TV+, I would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumbly because that’s another subscription I would potentially need to do. But it is worth noting a couple of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, I pay for and subscribe to F1 TV, which is Formula
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One’s own streaming service, which has always been pretty good, but has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good in this season. What makes it really special now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that when you’re watching on like the Apple TV, for example, you can not only have the main race
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feed, but you can additionally have like two or three other feeds. So you can have like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the race feed, and then your favorite driver and someone who’s your favorite driver’s enemy or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that off to the side is not literally picture in picture, but kind of an accessory screen. They’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell’s multi-view that he’s always talking about and so on. And so that’s really great. And that’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, $80 a year, if I recall correctly, or a season for the standard version. It’s like 120
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks for the fancy version I was just talking about where you get the multi-view. And also for the six of you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen to be Vision Pro owners, Vroom is an incredible app that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think is available anymore. It was only ever available via test flight, but you could hook up your F1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV credentials and log into that and get like an in-space multi-view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So imagine what I was just describing, but more little rectangles and all over the place. You could get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3D view of the, of the track and where the cars are in the track. It is phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll put a link in the show notes to a Reddit post that does a really good job of of showing a video of how this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. It’s really, really great. And that worked via F1 TV. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, I spoke about an immersive Vision Pro thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you got to ride along with Brad Pitt. And again, immersive means you can twist your head and you’ll get a different view and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I conflated that, I think, in the last episode with John’s video, which, John, remind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me what you had brought to the table.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pitt getting to drive a real F1 car by himself in a non-movie
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity as the actual just person Brad Pitt. And it was on YouTube. I think it was released around
⏹️ ▶️ John the time the F1 movie was released. So it’s pretty new, or at least it’s newly posted to YouTube. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that it wasn’t the same thing as you were describing, but I had just seen it recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I have since watched that because I don’t know how I missed it, but I didn’t know it was a thing. It’s like 20, 30 minutes. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re into Brad Pitt or F1 or anything like that. I freaking loved it. I thought it was delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will put the link in this show notes and then the immersive ride along thing. Unfortunately, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direct link to that immersive video, but I’ll put a link in the show notes to something that if you have your Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, if you scroll down on what I link to, you can find it there, but I can’t link you directly
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t discovered how links work yet. They’ll figure it out eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think there’s anybody listening to this right now who is currently as they’re listening, wearing a vision bro?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think there are people listening who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own one. Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. And the the immersive thing is all of like five minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s delightful. It’s really, really cool. And it gives you a real kind of feel for what it’s it’s like to be in an F1 car. It’s really
John’s toaster update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, is your toaster still really great? Because what I have in our internal show notes is John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toaster update, and I’m nervous. Uh-oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was last episode where I talked about my toaster that I got as a gag gift
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2011 at WWDC that turned out to be an amazingly good toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John that I kept for 14 years that just started going a little wonky, so I replaced it with the same model of toaster
⏹️ ▶️ John that had a couple of improvements. Well, since then, there have been developments. Well first is I did
⏹️ ▶️ John actually try to buy a spare part to fix the old toaster only after removing
⏹️ ▶️ John 8,000 screws that hold my old toaster together and getting at the part and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John about to remove it I realized oh the replacement part that I bought to replace it with is not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same The little connector is different I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ John cut the wires and spliced it together But they seem to have like heat resistant shielding on it And I was like nope not gonna do that
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna try to splice wires inside the toaster So I just put the 8,000
⏹️ ▶️ John screws back in and put it back together. So that was a bummer But anyway, the real update is that my brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new toaster when I was in the kitchen I think I was cooking something on the stovetop, but I wasn’t using a toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one to use the toaster for hours Suddenly the new toaster started going beep beep beep
⏹️ ▶️ John beep beep beep beep first I didn’t know where the heck the beeping was come from. It didn’t sound like a smoke alarm beeping it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a you know, just like a Computery beeping noise like what I don’t have any what in the kitchen could possibly be making
⏹️ ▶️ John that noise And then I looked over the toaster because the screen had come on and on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John were the letters e zero one That’s not good. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked that up in the manual And in the manual for my toaster It says the LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John screen will display e zero one when there is a non resettable issue with this appliance Should
⏹️ ▶️ John this occur immediately remove the power cord from the wall outlet and call Breville customer service
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did. Actually, they were closed. I had to wait the next day. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I called, I did unplug the
⏹️ ▶️ John toaster and then I called Breville customer service the next day. I was trying to navigate
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone tree and I’m in on hold, you know, as you are. I was calling on my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it said, by the way, if you don’t want to wait and listen to this hold music, you can press one and we’ll give you a call back. I’m like, yes, total, I
⏹️ ▶️ John totally want to do that. So I brought up the keypad and I pressed one. It didn’t work. And I tried it like nine times.
⏹️ ▶️ John It said, you know, Oh no. Press one if you want to call back. And I pressed one, it didn’t work. So I gave up, hung up, called on
⏹️ ▶️ John my landline phone, pressed one there, it worked fine. Eventually I got two callbacks from them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John their system was a little wonky. They did call me back, which was nice. And I said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it showed E01. And I always forget about that. I’ve talked about it multiple times in the show, but every
⏹️ ▶️ John time it happens to me, I’m like, oh yeah, that’s the age we live in. Do you remember when I had like the wonky Microsoft mouse and I said they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted me to like send a video of it being broken? Yeah. We’re in the age where all customer service
⏹️ ▶️ John people know that you probably have a way to take pictures and video immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John and send it to them. And so they’re like, why should I waste my time believing what people say on the phone like
⏹️ ▶️ John we used to in the old days when I can ask them to prove it with cameras and video.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this time they had like, they SMSed me a link to a webpage that asked to use the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, they wanted like live video of it. And here’s the thing, I knew because I had unplugged it. Well, first
⏹️ ▶️ John thing it is I unplugged it and plugged it back in E01 was still there. Then I unplugged it, left it unplugged for like an hour and plugged it back
⏹️ ▶️ John in and E01 was gone. And everything seemed to work fine, but I’m like, well, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just gonna leave this thing unplugged. So I knew what the deal was, but I’m like, well, if you wanna see video, all you’re gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ John is me plug the toaster in and it’s going to appear to work fine. And so sure enough, I did. I videoed,
⏹️ ▶️ John I plugged the toaster in. At this point, it had been off, unplugged overnight. I plugged the toaster in, it appeared to work fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John She had me do a bunch of test things and yep, see, it seems to work fine. And basically the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I was calling, I was like, look, the manual says unplug it immediately and call customer
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what I did. So I was like, why does it say that? Is it gonna catch fire or whatever? And she’s like, well, if it seems like it’s working
⏹️ ▶️ John fine now it should be fine. No, it won’t catch fire, blah, blah, blah. So if I die because my toaster burns my
⏹️ ▶️ John house down, send them this podcast. Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey told me and I asked repeatedly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So is it okay for me to keep using this toaster? Like, yep, totally fine. Plug it back in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like it’s working fine. You can plug it back in. It’s all good. If you see the error again,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can call us back. So this, and I haven’t seen the error again. We’ve used Toaster all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, multiple times a day, and it’s been fine so far. But anyway, this Toaster is on notice. And I still have
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one in the attic that has been unscrewed once and put back together. I don’t know what the deal is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, again, if you Google for this, lots of people have this easier one, various theories about what it might or might not be.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I haven’t seen it since, but I’m keeping my eye on it. And then, by the way, so I got, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said I pressed one for the callback. Eventually, the iPhone callback thing worked too. Like I pressed one
⏹️ ▶️ John and it said that they would call back. So I got two callbacks. One of them I did the whole rigamarole with.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other one, I just said, oh, someone else already called me back and I got my issue sorted out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then today, they called me again and said, hey, just checking in. Or were they checking to see if my house had burned down? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, just checking in to make sure you don’t have any problems. Like, nope, problem has to, so
⏹️ ▶️ John mixed review for Breville Customer Service. They actually call you back, which is not into always true of Apple, by the way, because I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John the callback thing on Apple and not got a call back many times in my life. I have gotten the callbacks many times in life as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, Breville is, you know, 100% on. They will call you back. And I didn’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John they were going to call again and say, just check in and everything’s fine. So there you have it. My new replacement toaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not sure what the deal is. Maybe it was just nervous about being in a new house. but we’ll see.
Marco’s Verizon update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually I had to do that that customer support video link thing on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my files went out and I had to call Verizon and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing with the thing with Verizon is Verizon files the you know that’s that’s their name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their fiber optic ISP to their to your home Verizon files is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get it working and once it’s hooked up you never have to interact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Verizon unless something breaks and in this case it only broke after you know, six continuous years of service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which okay, not too bad. However, when you do have to contact Verizon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s terrible. It got to be like Verizon has possibly the worst customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service I’ve dealt with in a very long time in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spinity has entered the chat.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fortunately, it’s a real,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s real race to the bottom between the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Titans. Yeah, like, you know, talk about like, you know, unhelpful people, very, very long hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two hour hold times, like very long hold times. Trying to upsell you at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely inappropriate times. Oh my God. Oh, totally. But they also did the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably using the same service where like, you know, they texted me a link. Just like John was saying, they texted me a link to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this web app that used the camera to stream video live to them, which I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I kind of felt a little bit uneasy about that, to be honest. I’m like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew that you were going to make me stream video to you as I like, you know, walk through my house to show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the router and the utility closet and everything. I’m like, maybe I would have cleaned up the house a little. I don’t know. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt it felt very invasive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t I don’t mind the invasiveness of it. And I’m not against it. I think it does actually. Let’s cut to the chase
⏹️ ▶️ John here. We have the technology. We should use it. It just surprises me every time, like especially in cases where if I just say, like my
⏹️ ▶️ John thing showed easier or what, like they used to before they had the ability to do this. They would just believe what you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John which obviously is a downside.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lie to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it also save time if you’re telling the truth. And I’m telling the truth about what happened. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, like I, I, in cases like Fios things, I think I would probably find it helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have lied to Pios in the past back when they used to be real angry if you weren’t using their equipment. And I never used
⏹️ ▶️ John their equipment, you know, like their router or anything. But, but these days they’re way more chill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. Yeah, I, the whole like, you know, show us a video thing. I can see why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do that. And I can see why it might work well in a lot of cases. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I just it feels a little bit skeevy to me. I don’t know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John love that Yeah, there’s totally some giant cache of the inside of everyone’s houses recorded on some website That’s insecure
⏹️ ▶️ John like the same way that like people getting access to the accidental like Siri activations and stuff This is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John happening with all those apps. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, definitely Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t had to do this in a long time Thankfully as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knock on wood But I know that my time will come and I mean in the because we moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this house in 2008 So it’s been almost 20 years. And I think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoken to Verizon Fios customer service twice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco maybe thrice. Once you get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working, you almost, you never have to deal with them, which is good because dealing with them is
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst. Well, I mean, so the in-house stuff is great, but like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John if a tree falls two blocks over and it breaks the fiber optic cable running into your
⏹️ ▶️ John house, you would think that’s like, well, they know about that, right? They’ll fix it. I don’t have to call. call, you probably have to call
⏹️ ▶️ John and going like trying to convince them or convince yourself that it really is the tree
⏹️ ▶️ John that fell and broke the wire. Like that’s the problem, not, Oh, you changed something in your
⏹️ ▶️ John house, you know, or your router is broken or whatever. Like, Oh, you’re not using the files router. It’s like, I swear it’s the tree. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John literally things are broken and on the ground, send a truck. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey promise. Uh, yeah.
Casey’s AirPods update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, I have my own update. I am the happy recipient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of refreshed, refurbished, replaced, repaired AirPods. So where we last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left our hero, I had gone to the Apple store. I don’t remember what day it was. I guess it was like Tuesday last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had said, hey, you know, my right earbud, I keep trying to call it earbud and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPod all at the same time. I can only say but one word at once. Bear with me, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you’re not the only person who has ever jumbled these names up. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone I’ve ever heard talk about these products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so true. Eye touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, my right eye touch, right eye touch was failing. So anyway, so I went to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple store and explained, Oh, you know, a listener was very kind to a, well, I didn’t say a listener, but you know, I said a friend had been very kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to would send me a replacement, uh, uh, case charging case. And that doesn’t seem to be working. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I do? And he said, all right, well, we’re going to put it back in the original case that it came with, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out past Casey had got had optioned Apple care on it. And we’re going to send both AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirBuds, whatever they’re called, jeezy peezy. AirPod is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basketball playing dog. Yeah, right. My bad. A great layup on that one. Anyways, we’re going to send all of them up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, which as it turns out is in Louisville, where all these repair places are. And we’ll see what happens. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I eventually, I forget when it was specifically, but I think it was like late last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week at like 10, 1030 at night, I got an email saying, Hey, we have results. Here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we found. And let me repeat to you that the right pod was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that was not able to charge, was dead as a doornail. The case seemed fine, the left pod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed fine. So they said, okay, here’s what we found. There’s water damage in the case, water damage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the left pod, water damage in the right pod, that’ll be 30 bucks, please. And for a minute, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I mean, that makes sense. Like you work out in them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, not terribly often, but I do. And I think there is a strong possibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I had dropped one of the, like the the right one in water at some point, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John about until- Oh, wait, wait, wait. This seems like something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you would remember. I just zoomed and swiped. Well, I agree. I agree that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John You think you might
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have dropped them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water? I think it is possible, Ben. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John material information to the case. Well, how can you, like, do they go into glasses of water so frequently that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t remember? That would be a notable event in my life if I dropped my AirPods into a thing of water. Do you mean like
⏹️ ▶️ John you dropped them onto like a little puddle on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the counter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I can imagine. I can’t, see, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My own memory, my own confidence in my own memory is so bad that I have a vague recollection of perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them, I think the right one, hopping into the sink, perhaps when I was taking my contacts out and cleaning them and whatnot, so there was standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water in the sink, and grabbing it immediately, but I mean, hey, water damage is water
⏹️ ▶️ John damage. Wait, there was standing water, you’re like, you had plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sink? Yeah, because I wear hard, we’re really going down the rabbit hole now. All right, so I wear hard contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lenses because I have a weird issue called keratoconus, and keratoconus means my eyeballs, not literally, but figuratively speaking, are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shaped like American footballs. And so hard contact lenses puts a nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regularly rounded surface in front of my eyes. And so that’s how I can see. And when I have my contacts in, I have pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good vision, not great, but pretty good vision. And if I take my hard contacts out, I’m freaking blind. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means because they’re hard contacts, they’re not disposable like everyone thinks of when they hear contact lenses. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to clean them every single night. And in that process, I plug the sink because it has happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many years ago that I’ve whiffed as I’m like rinsing them or whatever, and down the drain they go and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m out 300 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’re plugging it to stop something from going down the drain, but do you then fill the sink with water?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s just as in the process of rinsing them, the sink will fill with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John water. All right, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So maybe one fell out of your ear into the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sink, maybe it was like a half an
⏹️ ▶️ John inch of water in the bottom of it, you yanked it out real fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But I mean, hey, water is water, damage is
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, it doesn’t matter. This is another one of the things you get when you pay for AppleCare. In fact, some people wrote in to say this, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in part of the things you put in here. But like people send them through the wash all the time. Like they’re at dim right pocket. I sent my
⏹️ ▶️ John pants through the wash with my AirPods in them. You go and you got Apple care plus that will be 30 bucks new AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, exactly. So they said, Oh, there’s all this water damage. And of course, you know, I not dissimilar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my initial reaction to the movie database starting to bill me. And I was like, wait, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not true. That’s not right. And then I thought for a beat. And I was like, okay, yeah, sure. I’ll pay the 30 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What am I arguing this for?
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, like it’s those water sensors, like this is not this is not a waterproof device. It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John water resistant device. It’s not anything and it’s got holes in it. And like, I can imagine just your sweat being responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John water damage in a lot of AirPods. So that’s another reason to potentially get AppleCare on them if you can, if you know
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna sweat and kill them eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I think there is some water resistance to them. I think they’re just it’s just not a ton.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So one way or another, I paid my 30 bucks pretty much immediately. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thursday or Friday. I can’t recall that they said, okay, we’ll ship. I think it was Thursday night. They ended up shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Friday, if I recall correctly. And actually surprisingly early for UPS, they arrived at my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door today. The other funny thing was when I was with the genius, who again was very kind and very helpful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the genius was like, hey, we can ship this to your house if you want, but you’re going to have to be there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sign for it. And I was like, yeah, that’s fine. You’re gonna have to be there to sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it. Like, this is clearly a man who has been through some stuff with angry customers in the past, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was like, no, no, it’s fine. I work from home. It should be fine. And sure enough, the UPS came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dropped it on my front stoop and walked away. So I’m not mad at him, you know, having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey erred on the side of caution, but I thought that quite funny because he made a stink about the fact that I needed to sign for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I was hoping against all logic that maybe they would give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me not only, you know, a new two new AirPods, two new earbuds, two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe I would get a USB-C case. A USB-C case that to be completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear I in no way deserved. I was going to say no reasonable way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I straight up did not deserve a USB-C case, but I was hoping I did not receive a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which I’m sad. You’ll get one when
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy your AirPods 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the era of Apple, like giving you little upgrades for service, like that was occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case, you know, 15, 20 years ago. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still do it if they can’t get the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but Apple maintains a very strong supply chain now. So like that era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the past. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I mean, again, I didn’t expect it. I did not deserve it, but I was hoping. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that didn’t happen. So all told, this experience on the whole was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30 bucks later, plus whatever the cost of the initial AppleCare was, which I truly do not remember, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have what is effectively a brand new set of AirPods. Like maybe they were repaired rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than replaced, but it looks to me like it was, you know, a refurb or whatever. So on the whole, not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like my in-store experience was not great. Not in the sense that, you know, the Genius was bad. Again, the Genius was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just that I kind of wish they would have just given me a new set or whatever, a refurb set, and let me walk out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have news about that. Before we get to that though, real-time follow-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone in the chat, long form in the chat, has found footnote number nine on the AirPods Pro 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specs page. AirPods Pro 2 are dust, sweat, and water resistant for non-water sports and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercise. Products, including charging case, were tested under controlled laboratory conditions and have a rating of IP54.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dust, sweat, and water resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, Marco, you just said a moment ago, to a degree, they are at least resistant and that sounds accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re made to tolerate like, you know, workout sweat and maybe occasionally get, you know, if you’re jogging and it’s raining,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, stuff like that. Like they’re made to tolerate that, not immersion. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So now, feedback with regard to how I should have handled this. And I got a few different pieces of feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought were really great. Andrew on Things writes, I ran into the same send them in requirement in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, but it wasn’t a dire issue, so I held off for a bit to think about it. I called a few days later and Apple offered to ship me new ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately as long as I agreed to a temporary hold of my credit card until I sent mine back. Why this is not offered in-store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is beyond me.” I get why they may not want to do that in-store, but this was the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have handled it. Mark W. writes, to get my AirPods repaired, I hopped on the Apple support website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoke to someone in chat. Okay, quick aside from Casey now. Hi, this is Casey. I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some mechanism by which to chat. Again, like we were talking about in the pre-show, probably user error.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the life of me, I couldn’t find it. And that’s why I decided I’ll just go to the store because I thought I bet you I could do something about this via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat. I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s plain as day. I just did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not see it. It’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to find. I’ve stumbled upon it a few times, but I couldn’t find it if you asked me to
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, but it’s there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. So anyway, back to Mark. Blah, blah, blah. I spoke to someone in chat, answered a few questions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then just asked them for advanced replacement. And we’ll put a link. A listener, Vortex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually found the link that’s specific to AirPods advanced replacement and we’ll put that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. So anyway, back to Mark. Just ask them for advanced replacement and they set it up for me. You pay some nominal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fee up front and they ship a replacement AirPod to you the next day with return box and then the money is refunded when they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receive your faulty unit back. I’ve used the advanced replacement service many times over multiple sets of products and it’s the main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason I keep buying AppleCare because it means I never had to be without headphones. Let me tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the first world, the first world problems. But I went, you know, half a week or a week without my AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew I used my AirPods all the time. I knew they made my life and my personal opinion much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize how awful life was without my AirPods. Again, I’m being a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyperbolic, but holy jamolis, it was genuinely burdensome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to have my AirPods. And it was such a relief when they came back in today. So yes, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advanced replacement or perhaps Express Replacement Service. And again, we’ll put a link in the show notes. Express
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Replacement Service is a benefit of AppleCare Plus for AirPods. With Express Replacement Service, we’ll ship you a replacement device so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to wait for repair. And this service is, it exists for other device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey classes as well, not just AirPods. The link we’ll put in the show notes is explicitly for AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll put a link, or you can find equivalent links for other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Anonymous writes, there are two aspects of your story that I noticed factoring into the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why dead, dead and untroubleshootable AirPods need to be serviced off-site, counterfeit products and AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus coverage. About About a year or two after AirPods launched, my coworkers and I noticed a lot of fake AirPods coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. Sure, the first few waves of them were easy to spot. The size or color was off, the case looked janky, and they generally had no serial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number to identify them. Then the knockoffs got better. And soon they were in real cases with real warranty coverage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The fake but convincing AirPods won’t turn on, and the next service step would be a replacement. After a while, we got more tools to identify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual AirPods, which now had individual serial numbers as well. All this to curb a cycle in which fake AirPods could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be laundered into genuine working AirPods. So to conclude, no part serial does not mean no new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods, and thus off to the depot they go. AppleCare Plus extends the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usefulness of a serialized case in this chain by a year. It wouldn’t also, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me try that again. It also wouldn’t be uncommon for us to see other fake Apple devices at the Genius Bar carrying real serial numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often with AppleCare Plus coverage attached. This blew my mind. I should have expected it, blew my mind. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that made me feel a little bit better about the fact that when this thing is freaking dead And presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can’t interrogate this AirPod to see what its serial number is. Okay, maybe I am trying to pass them a fake.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if they can, because apparently the fakes carry legitimate serial numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have a way to tell whether this is the actual one that we sold with the serial number or a fake one. So I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe when they send it away, they have other ways to tell whether they’re legitimate, like
⏹️ ▶️ John x-raying the inside of them or something or
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, dealing with counterfeits is an ongoing problem for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think we don’t fully appreciate like, you know, in in most nerd circles, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extent to which they are, you know, that that people try to defraud them and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a profit. And this isn’t, you know, this isn’t just like, you know, somebody, you know, an individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to like, you know, return used AirPods to get new ones. This is like large scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations, especially in China, you know, where like the black market and like organized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crime is involved. It’s a really huge thing of like basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defrauding Apple out of trading in counterfeit copies of their devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that say they don’t work to get real ones and then sell them for a profit. It’s a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And basically as a result of that, that’s oftentimes what is behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple like further locks down parts pairing and repairs and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care coverage and everything. It’s often to counteract whatever the latest techniques are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these people who defraud them. And so it’s a whole huge cat and mouse game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which we aren’t really aware of and don’t really see, but it’s going on. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the problem with all of this though is that the result is AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just going to get worse for Apple’s legitimate customers. There’s not really an obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good solution to it, except that you think you could just walk in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trade stuff in and get them replaced in person in the stores. And that’s going to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be slowly eroded over time as all of these, you know, basically scam and fraud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defenses have to keep going up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bad people ruin stuff for everybody. I mean, but the express replacement is good because they’ll still catch
⏹️ ▶️ John the fraud presumably because you do have to send it back and they have put a hold on your credit card. So if they get if you send
⏹️ ▶️ John in fake ones to, you know, to someplace where they can check that they’re fake, you’re just not going to get your your money back. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it stops the counterfeiting, presumably, but also it helps you not be without AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John for as long as Casey was. So I guess that’s the the the best workaround we have for
⏹️ ▶️ John this unfortunate situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you all made fun of me for my initial solution of my AirPods don’t last as long as a plane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ride. I just bought a second pair. I’m I am so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I keep two pairs of AirPods because not like you know, if one if the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is dead, is dead because I haven’t, I’ve forgotten to charge it for a while. No problem. I’ll just take out the other pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. If I accidentally leave one at the house and I’m out somewhere and I have my backpack with me, I have the other
⏹️ ▶️ John No problem. I was wondering why Casey doesn’t have a house full of old AirPods like I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I have, so my AirPods Mark 1, if you will, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given to Erin and she almost never uses them. And I did that, you know, married person thing where I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, it’s really stinky. I don’t have my AirPods right now, hoping that she would say, oh yeah, you could take mine back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little while. But that seemed a bit aggressive, even though she almost never uses them. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should be a grown-ass man who can last five days without my beloved AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did, but only just.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I could have gone to the attic and dug up some of my like OG AirPods that probably would have lasted 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes at a time, but that would have been better than nothing. But it just didn’t seem worth the effort, especially because the attic is a trillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degrees right now. And then finally on the AirPods topic, a different anonymous person and writes, it’s not uncommon for my store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run into five sets or more of fake AirPods per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day that we visually identify. It’s unknown to me how many we send out that are later found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be non-genuine products. So here’s the thing, like this is what Marco was saying a moment ago. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to really crack into the right to the right to repair discussion because that’s, we’ve been through it. It’s not useful right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you look at it from Apple’s perspective, A lot of the stuff that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that gets iFixit upset, I understand, this is Marco’s point, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why and how they got there. That doesn’t make it right, but I get how they got there. And this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very tricky problem to solve. And I had no idea how bad it was. And this anonymous person said they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were in a metro area, but they didn’t specify specifically where, but it sounded to me like it was a roughly Richmond-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metro area. It was not like a Manhattan or anything like that. So I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize how prevalent this was and how widespread.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet most of those people don’t know they have fake AirPods. You know what I mean? That’s also very like they just bought them online
⏹️ ▶️ John and they saw they found a good deal on AirPods and they had no idea they were being sold counterfeit goods and also they don’t work and they bring them in.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s got to be the common case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh absolutely. I mean there’s so like back in the day I don’t know how much this is still the case but back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD cards were very commonly counterfeited and so I you know like I once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unknowingly bought a counterfeit one on Amazon like a counterfeit SanDisk SD card right from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Amazon, you know, ships from and sold from amazon.com, like everything. And so I, from that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward, I was very careful to only ever buy SD cards from B&H because I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they are also a very good high quality retailer and they’re very strict with their supply chain. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon is not strict with their supply chain at all. And so you don’t really know necessarily what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re getting on Amazon. And I still buy everything else on Amazon really, but like, you know, the stuff where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing matters a lot and where they’re highly counterfeited, I buy from more more authoritative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sources like B&H. I think now that Apple’s products are that highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counterfeited, it’s probably best for it’s not just something like AirPods that apparently are very easy to counterfeit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s even more important than ever to buy Apple’s products of those types
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s I agree with you on paper, but have you seen the deals running on AirPods Pro I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now actually on Amazon, they are like 80
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they AirPods Pros 2? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey fair, but they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absurdly discounted. So again, doesn’t make you wrong, but woof, if it were me, it’d be hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pass that up. Anyway, so yeah, so in summary, 30 bucks later, I have effectively new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods, which is great for today, but future Casey is gonna be real mad when those AirPods Pro 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come out, and I really wanna upgrade, and I look at my like two month old AirPods Pros 2. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gonna be your backups then. Yeah. When you drop
⏹️ ▶️ John the threes in the sink.
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Tahoe-tab hack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, tell me, John, about tabs in Tahoe, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something I mentioned on the last episode, that there was a way to set
⏹️ ▶️ John a property list entry somewhere to revert the weird capsule-shaped tabs in Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John to be more normal-looking tabs. And I couldn’t remember if it was like a global one or app-specific
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But anyway, Steve Stratton Smith pointed me to the two of his that I was remembering.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is global, it’s defaults, right? Minus G, which is the global specifier. The key is
⏹️ ▶️ John NSSolarium window tabs, and then you set it to a Boolean value of false,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it won’t use the capsule-shaped tabs. Steve says it sets
⏹️ ▶️ John it at the app kit level, so it should affect all apps using the system tabs, but Safari does not use the system tabs,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it won’t affect Safari, and that was thus the confusion about whether it was global. I just tried it in
⏹️ ▶️ John terminal, and so they look, tabs look more normal, but everything is still like extremely bright white, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t like, it doesn’t change the UI back to Sequoia or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to try that out for as long as that option lasts, have fun. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the Tahoe public beta is coming soon. I think it was accidentally released to some people already, so you could
⏹️ ▶️ John at least probably try it in the public beta if it’s still there. Yeah, probably tomorrow I would
A18-laptop ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, low cost Apple laptops with A18 Pros. Mandanam writes, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would not be the first A-series chip in a Mac as there was, oh, I forgot to bring this up. This pissed me off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much because I thought about this when we were recording and then it completely slipped my mind to say something because we got sidetracked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on talking about us, talking about something else and then I meant to circle back and never did. So anyway, Mandanam writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this would not be the first time the A-series or the first A-series chip in a Mac as there was the Apple Silicon Developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Transition Kit which used the A12Z from the iPad Pro. I mean, technically, was that a Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, fair. Yes. I mean, you couldn’t do a ton with it, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, but it was called the Apple Developer Transition Kit, wasn’t it? I don’t remember it had a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe that’s right. But anyway, yes, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, there have been, you could run Mac, it’s better to say you could run Mac OS on A-series chips before, but to call this a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, obviously it’s not a Mac that people could buy in the general public, and we had to send them all back to Apple. So you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even get to keep them. We leased it for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re saying it’s not a Mac, but is it a robot or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it’s worth noting that. That was the A12Z, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John way slower than the A18, and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many different people had a few different things to write or to add. Perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shell would be plastic instead of aluminum. I don’t think that’s probable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. People have fond memories of the plastic iBooks, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the toilet seat ones that came in fun colors. So I think there’s a lot of nostalgia for that. Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John tap into that nostalgia and make a really good plastic MacBook, but plastic is
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good a conductor of heat as aluminum. And with today’s thin and light laptops, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a plastic one doesn’t have the strength or the heat conductivity to be an option. So I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not particularly likely, but people really did love those colorful ones. So keep up alive, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess. I mean, honestly, I think when people are hoping for a plastic MacBook, they’re not thinking about the iBooks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re thinking about the plastic MacBooks, the Intel ones from 2006 through. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was the Icebook 2, like the white one. There was a whole bunch of plastic ones, not just the toilet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so right at the end of the plastic era, so when we think fondly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the plastic MacBooks, what we are thinking of is those very first gen Intel ones from 2006 and eight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the ones where the hand rest would get cracked or would yellow or things like that. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the very end, they still, I think it was like 2010, it was surprisingly late, they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a unibody-ish looking plastic one. It was like the cheap MacBook product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for businesses and education for a year or two. And it was a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white plastic case. It was, I believe, basically one piece or very few pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they did like a unibody plastic or something close to that Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t have any of the problems that the earlier plastic ones did it was just like it was the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one And by that point everybody else was you like the entire rest of the line was using these cool metal ones and nobody really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cared about those anymore, but They could do something like that So I think I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about heat because as we learned there are like, you know basically like safety requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most countries where they can’t just bond the processor to the metal body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the laptop because it gets too hot and you can’t have that on somebody’s lap or touching somebody’s skin.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why aluminum is good because it lets the heat spread and not concentrate in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well but so their their usual approach to heat management is like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just stick the processor bonded heat wise somehow to the case they have a heat sink on the processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a fan blows air over it and then there’s vents on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh it’s surely to be fanless right? Do you think the A-series Mac is Is it gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fanless? Yeah, if you look at the low end, the MacBook Air is fanless, and that uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 or whatever, but the way they do that is with an air gap. They basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat up the cavity inside of it and hope it cools a little bit by convection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the iPhone chip uses way less peak power than the M4, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s definitely gonna be fanless, but I think they could do a similar thing where they’re not attaching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to the case, So you don’t really necessarily need the case. You just need ventilation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can’t be sealed. Maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get away with it, but aluminum would be better. But here’s the thing. I think people forget exactly how massive,
⏹️ ▶️ John by modern standards, those plastic ones were. Even the very
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey last plastic one
⏹️ ▶️ John that you just described. Forget about the toilet seat. If you ever looked at a toilet seat, you’d be like, was this always this big? Yeah, it was always that big. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Icebook that people have fond memories of, massive, huge, gigantic, way bigger than you remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even those old plastic MacBooks, including the black MacBook that you charged extra for or that last
⏹️ ▶️ John unibody one, they’re a lot bigger, especially on things like the screen, like how thick is
⏹️ ▶️ John the top lid that has the screen in it. I’m not sure you can do a top lid like that with plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think they’re gonna have an aluminum top lid and a plastic bottom. So I think the plastic is extremely unlikely. Engineering wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be done, but it seems like it would be, again, at this point, more effort
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to figure out how to make a viable laptop in modern proportions
⏹️ ▶️ John performance with no fan out of plastic than would for them to just use aluminum, especially if they were using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think you’re probably right. I think I think plastic is a stretch in this case because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like that one of the big benefits of using aluminum in this case is you get a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rigidity for a thin case plastic. You don’t get a lot of rigidity. So typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic electronics have some kind of metal frame inside of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know it doesn’t necessarily cover the entire thing But it’s like you know a frame a skeleton basically made of metal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add rigidity in various points And so they would probably need to do something like that And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine they would I can’t imagine that would be worth the trade-off like I think they would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they want to have a different case construction that is cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My idea that I said last time about like just not doing a unibody having it be like in panels I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is more likely gross but But but again the keep in mind to this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they are going for very inexpensive They are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna want to replace that that Walmart $650 Mac you know m1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air now one option I believe they mentioned as an upgrade like one option is they could just Keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using that old MacBook Air case that teardrop shape when I
⏹️ ▶️ John said that on the last episode stop crediting upgrade for things that I said Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, they could just keep using that case, which they are currently selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new in a $650 laptop. So that is possible to just keep using that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that price point. What I really hope is that they don’t jack up that price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point too much. That obviously, like whenever Apple has a low price point and then they introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a replacement, like a generational leap for that product, they almost always raise the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first and then eventually chip it down back to that product. So hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be, like if they have to go above 650 for this new one, when it’s brand new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully then after a year or two, it’s right back down there or maybe even lower. I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could really get a lot of great market share if they could get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as close to that $500 point as possible because if you look at what is out there in PC laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of options at those prices and they’re not all garbage. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some decent ones that are around that price point. And again, and if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making that low-end iPad for 300 bucks, like they can totally do this with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the same parts, just throw a keyboard and trackpad on there. So we know they can do it if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose to. I really hope they do and I think it could be a very interesting product. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though that that has to be a super cool thin and light product. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really could just be that old MacBook Air case, or it could be the M2 forward MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air case, like the flat one that we have now. It could just be that case with lower spec parts in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they’re more creative than that, and I hope they take the opportunity, if they’re gonna do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new, to really rethink a lot of those design choices to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically cheaper, not just $100 or $200 cheaper. but that is not necessarily the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook way. The Tim Cook way normally is you just keep selling the older one and the older one and the older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and cut 100 bucks off, each year it goes older. That’s the Tim Cook way and that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for a while but if they really wanna dig down into that price range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get really much lower than where they are now, they need something that’s designed that way from the start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m still very interested to see what this product ends up being.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it could be really, really cool. And I think the disaster scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my hopes and dreams here is, it’s literally just the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an A18 instead of an M4. And it’s like $200 cheaper. That I think would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the very disappointing scenario. But I hope they do more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shall see. We are getting a call that Jason says that he said it before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mark, are you? I’m sure he
⏹️ ▶️ John did, but I didn’t hear it before I recorded it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, if you’re on this podcast and you’re going to credit somebody with,
⏹️ ▶️ John think I heard somebody say this. You heard me say it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I mean, in all fairness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so upgrade comes out on Mondays. I usually make a point to listen to it before we record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because same we cover a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the same topics. I make a point not to listen to it before we record for exactly this reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because we cover a lot of a lot of similar topics, I try to listen to them before we record. And so chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are I did hear about it from Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John before I heard about it from you. I know, but you heard it from me most recently. You heard it from me most recently. And it’s most relevant to this show because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s the show that I’m on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like a last modified thing. It doesn’t matter who said it most recently. You touched it last.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the in the trying to reach back into your memory. I think recency might make it more prominent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my god. Primacy. Is that the right word? Makes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it more prominent in your mind?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, gentlemen. Another piece of feedback that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent in, hey, maybe it’ll run iPadOS instead of macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want that. That’s just an iPad with a keyboard. We have those already.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s something that we’ve talked about for years that a lot of people want. And the rumor mill being what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not ridiculous to assume that maybe they got this wrong. What we’re talking about is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad with a permanently attached keyboard with a hinge, like an iPad laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John for the entire history of Apple selling various floppy or not so floppy keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John that you attach to iPads, many people have said, I love iPadOS. I would love to use this as a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the floppy thing isn’t right, and it’s heavy, and it’s weird, and can’t they just sell me an iPad with
⏹️ ▶️ John a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad, just like, you know, a regular laptop, only it’s not a laptop, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad. I think that’s a product that some people still want.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think enough people want it that Apple’s gonna make it, but this type of rumor is the type of thing that could be misconstrued
⏹️ ▶️ John by a game of telephone or whatever the other analogy, the people, lots of people feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John different parts of the elephant and not knowing which part, like a cheaper device
⏹️ ▶️ John with an A series processor, but I honestly, I think if it was an iPad, they would probably say, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a touchscreen and that really, or there’d be like some kind of touchscreen Mac rumor. So for all the people out there who want
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad with a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad, We hear you, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna I think this rumor is not that because I think if we would know if it had like a touchscreen or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think and by the way that would be the thing to call iBook if you were gonna bring that name Oh, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I think the the reality is that the iPad for most of the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want that They’re already using iPads, and it’s basically fine for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want You know inexpensive laptops or less expensive laptops I should say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who want less expensive laptops, usually there’s something about iPad OS that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes them say, no, I can’t do that or I don’t want to do that, that’s not what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ultimately, when people want a laptop, they’ve already had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option to make an iPad into a laptop for many, many, many years. So all the people who are satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that already have it. I think Apple could make a better version of that if they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it built in. You know, they wouldn’t need all this bulk for the case to attach to the iPad and the weird hinge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the counterweighting and everything. The experience of using an iPad with the modern magic keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think frankly is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so thick. They’re so heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doubles the weight of the whole thing. And most of that is structure and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparatus that you wouldn’t need if you did make a build, a combined product that just had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop base with a screen and it ran iPadOS. The resulting combo device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was made that way from the start to have a keyboard, you’d put the battery at the bottom, you’d have the thin screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d make concessions that would make it far more compact and easier to mechanically operate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it could be better. But I just don’t think that the people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use an iPad as a laptop are so dissatisfied with the current options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this would gain Apple much market share. Whereas, if you look at how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want a laptop, but don’t want to pay $1,000 for it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go to any store, or you can go on Amazon, or whatever, and you can buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not awful PC laptop for $500, that’s a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential market to expand into. So I think, I hope, Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco addresses that to try to expand the Mac market share meaningfully rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this ends up just being an iPad with a keyboard built in, like, that’s fine. But I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much smaller incremental market above what they already have. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, I’m contractually obligated to bring up what a handful of people said. Cellular?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The A18 already knows how to talk to cell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John networks and cell modems. We talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on past episodes. I know, but still, I got to say it again
⏹️ ▶️ John because come on. trying to manifest as the kids say. It’ll happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But see we already have M4 cellular devices. They’re called iPad Pros and iPad
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Apple sues John Prosser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so as we record, it was a day or two back, I think, that we heard news that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is suing John Prosser, the prolific leaker, for stealing their iOS trade secrets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from The Verge, Apple has sued the well-known leaker John Prosser for the alleged theft of trade secrets related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iOS 26. According to the lawsuit, Apple claims that Prosser offered Michael Ramiciotti
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money or a future job opportunity in exchange for access to a company phone belonging to his friend, Ethan Lipnick, an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple software engineer working on iOS. Ramasiyati allegedly learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lipnick’s iPhone passcode, used quote-unquote location tracking to determine when he’d be away from home for an extended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey period, and then accessed the iPhone running a development version of the mobile OS. Apple says that Ramasiyati
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed the software to Prosser over a video call, which Prosser recorded, shared with others, and then used to create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey renders of the new designs. Apple says it found out the details of what happened in April from an anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email from someone who claimed to have seen Prosser’s recording of the call and recognized Lipnick’s apartment. The company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also claims to have a voice note sent by Ramshayati to Lipnick apologizing for the incident and claiming that the subterfuge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Prosser’s idea, which Lipnick in turn provided to Apple. Lipnick was fired by Apple for failing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly follow its policies around securing unreleased software.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yikes. I think when we saw these demo videos where it’s like, oh, he was being smart by not showing the info he
⏹️ ▶️ John has, he’s showing a recreation. So that way, you know, someone, whoever leaked it doesn’t get in trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John because you could figure out what build they had or secret stuff in the background that you can only, you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like watermarking it or something. So that part was smart. The part that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like it’s smart is the thing that he’s accused of doing is pretty clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the realm of just like, I’m just, you know, I just report things that people tell me. It’s more like a
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of a conspiracy to commit a crime which is to access
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple employee’s phone without their consent or whatever. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John The details are fuzzy and I’m sure it’ll be hashed out in court. But reading this whole story I was thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was my profession to do like, to you know, do Apple leaks, which I think is a perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John fine thing. Like any kind of journalist that you can get sources who are going to give you secret information and you publish it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. like I would be a lot more careful than it seems like these
⏹️ ▶️ John people were being about what is and isn’t the right way to do that. Like, you know, learn,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I guess, I mean, I guess you live and learn. This is how people learn. But like, uh, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is covered and what isn’t, when do I become a criminal and when do I not, if I just accept anonymously leaked information and publish
⏹️ ▶️ John it, uh, you know, is there are other cases where that’s a problem, but like, you know, working with
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody to try to get, you know, access to company secrets yourself is now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John basically like a computer criminal. Like, it’s not, you’re not so much a journalist or a
⏹️ ▶️ John leaker anymore, but yeah, I bet these folks play fast and loose with that just
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so, the desirability of getting a big scoop and the value of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John so big to them that I can see people being tempted to do things like the accusations in this case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, when I first heard about this, my reaction was, oh, that is so gross. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the most valuable companies in the world going after a guy. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just feels super icky to me. And then I continued to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read more about what he’s accused of. And obviously maybe this is all fabrications. Maybe it’s all lie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, like, like as an example, um, what did I read a second? Where is it? Uh, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there claims to have a voice note sent by Ramsey, Audi to Lipnick apologizing for the incident, claiming the subterfuge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was process idea. How convenient. Right? Like that could be completely fabricated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this will get a hashed out in court, but like, there is precedent for Apple essentially shutting
⏹️ ▶️ John down leakers when they do something where they’re basically the leaker is in the wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John legally speaking, and Apple uses its weight to crush them. And that’s part
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, it’s kind of like a, if a newspaper, like if reporters for a newspaper hack their way
⏹️ ▶️ John into Apple and took secrets out and publish them, uh, Apple should sue them
⏹️ ▶️ John should win and they shouldn’t do that. Right. But that’s what this court case will
⏹️ ▶️ John determine. Now obviously, any kind of court case, especially in this country, is so lopsided when one company has infinity money
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other person in the court case has essentially zero when rounded, compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John how much money Apple has for lawyers. So that part of it isn’t great and fair, but hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll figure out what the truth is here eventually. You know, it’s a tough business
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in. If Apple leaks out your business, there’s lots of danger. And one of the dangers is the big angry tiger that
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple that doesn’t want leaks to happen. Apple is usually, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say nice, but like more hands off than you would imagine. But if any of the facts
⏹️ ▶️ John in this case are actually as reported here, I can see Apple saying, this one we
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, the one thing I feel bad about this thing is that the employee was fired, the Lipnick was fired.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I know, I’m sure he violated things by not properly securing blah, blah, blah. But if he was like duped
⏹️ ▶️ John into doing this, I don’t know, Maybe they have evidence that he was not as, that he actually participated in
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, but like, everyone makes mistakes. Like, I don’t think the guy who left the iPhone 4 in a bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John he didn’t get fired, did he?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think so. But, so there’s a few things there. First of all, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can understand how this Lipnick person got fired because clearly he left this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-release phone, or maybe not pre-release hardware, but pre-release software in a place where other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people could get to it, and his passcode was not secure enough other people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John discover it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where was the place that other people could get to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In his apartment, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John still. In his house? Like, ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hear you. I do. But I mean, any Apple person I’ve ever spoken to that has gotten pre-release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything is kind of bananas about it. And they’re supposed to be. You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never asked for like a leak or anything like that, to be clear. But as a matter of fact, I think I told the story years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But after the Apple Watch was announced, and so it was public, I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dinner or drinks or something with a friend of mine who was working on the Apple watch. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, he was allowed to wear it out because it had already been announced or whatever. And I was, and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had his wrist, like, or his hand on the table and I was like, Oh wait, let me, let me see that. And like, let me touch it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. I just want to see what it felt like. And he like jerked his hand back. You can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, Oh, okay. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be any kind of way. It just, I didn’t realize. And he was like flabbergasted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would even make a motion to like, just pet the outside of this like watch band to see what it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. It’s like when I
⏹️ ▶️ John grabbed the mouse of the iMac Pro at W3C and got scolded by an Apple person. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. A Mac that was out
⏹️ ▶️ John in the public in a place where people could see it, but like, oh, you can’t touch it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. So, but to go back to what you were saying a moment ago, what I was starting to say, and then we got sidetracked, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I first heard this, yeah, it felt really gross to me. But then as I’m hearing more, and, you know, again, we don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reality is. But if you’re to believe what Apple is asserting, that this was a concerted effort, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of conspiracy, I think you said a moment ago, to get this information out of this device and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of this employee. I don’t think I’m too upset about them going after Prosser.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s I feel bad for him, but like, F A F O man, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of get it. I kind of get it. I don’t know, Marco, where do you come down on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know enough of the specifics yet to judge for sure, you know, who’s liable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what and who should be prosecuted for what or whatever. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a very, very bad idea for companies to sue journalists. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a great idea most of the time. It is occasionally, you know, you can occasionally have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good grounds for that. It is occasionally the right move or at least a valid move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very dangerous move and it’s like they have to be you have to be really sure what you’re you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and I think it can it can very easily have a chilling effect like where I stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on on what has probably happened here I don’t think there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong if somebody gives you information for you to report on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know because look we do that like you know we don’t have the kind of sources they do like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have like you know really salacious you know here is what the next version of I would like you know nobody gives us that information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we don’t ask for it. But if people tell us stuff and we talk about it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show, it’s not that far from that. Like you can see a world in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which if Apple sues Jon Prosser for this and wins,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if we talk about what Jon Prosser’s videos had in them and we say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh look, Jon Prosser, this YouTuber, had this report that alleges these mockups of what the new iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will look like and we talk about it, are we putting ourselves in danger by talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’ve identified the line, which is in that scenario, we would have no
⏹️ ▶️ John participation in the extraction of this information from Apple. Like someone posted it on a web page and then we’re just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about what we saw on a public web page, right? So we’re fine there. Are we? Prosser would be fine if
⏹️ ▶️ John he just received this information and published it. But if he was conspiring with how to break into this guy’s
⏹️ ▶️ John apartment when he’s not there and look at his phone without a suit of consent, that has nothing to do with journalism has
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to do with like, that’s just forget about journalism. That’s just a crime period, like going
⏹️ ▶️ John and go into someone’s apartment and messing with their stuff when they’re not in there, monitoring their locations and
⏹️ ▶️ John know when they’re not there and then going and getting their stuff. That’s I mean, again, this is this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John civil suit, not a criminal things. But you know, depending on how they executed this plan, it could actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be criminal proceeding or maybe they got let in by a roommate. But even if they got let in by a roommate, they’re messing with other roommates stuff. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John in a civil procedure, like this looks like a conspiracy, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John participating in to get the information. If you’re a journalist, you can’t be planning how we’re going to break into
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s HQ and get the secrets out. You’re not a journalist anymore. When you do that, you’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just industrial espionage. You’re just you’re just a criminal. You’re a spy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that I mean, yeah, that so I do agree like there is an obvious difference between like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are paying for the information, if you are hiring people to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for you, you like that is a different level of involvement. But we don’t necessarily know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s enough evidence that John Prosser was at that
⏹️ ▶️ John being accused of. We’ll find out in court whether they have evidence, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did this like it’s too soon to say I’m sure they had good reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claim what they’re claiming. I hope they have good reason to claim what they’re claiming because
⏹️ ▶️ John I did see some of the evidence that’s like I can see this again be interesting court case because of one of the conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John I think process or whoever was talking with says, well, at least you’ll have like plausible deniability
⏹️ ▶️ John because I did this without all your consent and or no, I forget which way they were going, but they discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John this very issue of like essentially, is John Prosser part of this? Like does he
⏹️ ▶️ John or is are his hands clean? And they had like a funny back and forth and like and a messages conversation that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John the the evidence and and that’s submitted as part of this case. What idiots and because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re debating about it, and there could be like laughing and joking and sarcasm. Like I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John how it’s going to play in court of like, well, we were just kidding about that. But I do have plausible deniability and
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t participate in especially if like, you know, Apple can flip one of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John around on processor and they’ll say, yeah, well, you know, get him to say that when he said that, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ John believed he was serious and not being sarcastic. Like that’s the tricky part about like, you know, with with
⏹️ ▶️ John text, there’s always the problem of like, is my intention coming across in Texas, why people put emojis
⏹️ ▶️ John in and stuff. And when it becomes a court exhibit trying to explain like imagine having to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John in court like texts that you sent people that could potentially be ambiguous depending on whether you’re being sarcastic or funny or joking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t want to be in that situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, not fun. There was I think there was a 99 p I episode. I’m not gonna be able to dig it up about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like interpreting emoji in the context of legal agreements and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating. And I don’t remember the conclusions, but it made me very uncomfortable because
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets like it when it’s just when it’s It’s just a message thread, who cares? But when this is potentially evidence of whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not there was a crime committed and it hinges on whether you knew this thing or whatever and you make a joke about it, and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but were you serious? Or was that like, did you put, if you write ha ha after it, or a lol, or
⏹️ ▶️ John a happy, like which one of those things mean you’re obviously kidding, and which one of those things mean you’re just excited about the fact that you participated
⏹️ ▶️ John in this crime? I would never want to have to argue that. I would never want my fate to hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John on the interpretation of that, you know what I mean? But I’m sure there’ll be more evidence that comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks to the long form who immediately found the link for that 99 PI episode, which is it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey required listening by any means But it’s worth your time if you haven’t heard it the other thing I wanted to talk about is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gruber took a look at one of the documents that was in the legal release and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s Saying I’m not sure. This is an email. I’m not sure who to contact but as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey courtesy to the iOS 19 team at Apple I wanted to share information that I have about an employee who leaked pre-release design details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iOS 19 information shared by John Prosser is sourced from Ethan Lipnick, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they have some redacted names that Gruber has done what appears to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job of really bang up job of filling in who he thinks these names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. So this is the aforementioned Ramsey Yaddy, Ian Zelbo, Joe Rosignol, and Michael
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Burkhart as are all listed potentially in the redacted sections of this note.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, uh, Joe Rossignol is from, uh, what, MacRumors, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shoot, I should know this, and now I’m drawing a blank.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve seen his name a thousand times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, those other names that don’t… Those other names don’t ring any bells for me, but obviously Gruber knows them.
⏹️ ▶️ John What he was doing, by the way, this looks like one of those things where someone failed to redact a PDF, like they just, you know, put a black box over
⏹️ ▶️ John the letters, but when you could select, you know what I mean? But that’s not the case. I think they did correctly redact it, and what Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John was doing was simply matching the font and size and then typing in letters in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John font and size, seeing what names would fit. Now, obviously, there’s tons of names that would fit in those spaces, but presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber knows that these names are actually relevant to this particular case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a big coincidence if these are not the names that fit in there, but we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ John He also put a card down saying that he has a theory about who the tipster is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like who sent this email to Apple. And he did his usual thing where he puts an MD5 hash of his prediction, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll find out in the future if he was right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think John Gerber will be the last person to use MD5? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I use it constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John truly. It still works fine for this purpose. It annoys me that Apple deprecated the APIs on
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS because I use them as part of hyperspace. I’m not using them for cryptographic
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes. I’m using them for other purposes. And I don’t care that they’re easily
⏹️ ▶️ John cracked or whatever. It’s not. When you’re not using them cryptographically, I wish there was a way I could turn off that warning and say, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not using it for cryptography. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think somebody’s going to like rainbow table attack John Gruber’s tweets about it? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think of something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber seems to think it’s harder because he does like a full sentence and not a word. But yeah, somebody, someone with a big farm of GPUs probably could
⏹️ ▶️ John crack this if they wanted, but I don’t think it’s worthwhile. We’ll find out soon enough.
Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Let’s talk about some news from a couple of weeks ago now, actually almost a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month ago. Cloudflare has announced that in certain circumstances, they will be blocking AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crawlers by default. And so reading, they have a marketing page blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post about this, and then they also have a news release from the blog post. For nearly 30 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the deal that Google made with content creators was simple. Let us copy your content for search, and we’ll send you traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But search is now declining in favor of AI, and AI doesn’t reward content creators the way that search did. Instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair trade, the web is being strip-mined by AI crawlers, with content creators seeing almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no traffic and therefore almost no value. That changes today, July 1, what we’re calling Content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with the majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I wanted to talk about this because this sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloudflare is being a hero and I’m sure they have their hearts in the right place, but…
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of those things you said were not my initial reaction to this, but continue. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this kind of… this sat very badly with me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the situation is that yes, the kind of implicit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal between web search engines and kind of the ability to publicly crawl websites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and publishers, that deal no longer holds in the realm of in the world of AI. Like that is true and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that radically changes the dynamics of bots crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco websites. But the problem is that’s going to radically change the dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of any ability for any software to automatically fetch the comments of a website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you might think, Oh, who cares? That’s no big deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t think of any major app I’ve written that hasn’t needed to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tumblr did that for its ill-advised RSS importing feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RSS itself is something on a website that is hosted by the website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you proxy your website behind Cloudflare, that includes your RSS feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So RSS readers, you know, will run into this problem if they if your site is too aggressively blocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Cloudflare and podcast apps definitely do it. Instapaper certainly needs
⏹️ ▶️ John But but but RSS readers and podcast clients wouldn’t fall under the category of quote AI companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well so here’s the thing. When Cloudflare protects you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from things online, they they protect you from what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel is bot traffic in in you know whatever threshold they are or whatever heuristic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re running as like this is suspicious or this is this might be an attack or this might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scraping all of your content but what if you just have a bunch people hitting your RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed what if you what if there is like you know overcast servers for a while I had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem where like overcast crawls millions of RSS feeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day from six IP addresses. I ran into this problem a couple years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where cloudflare was starting to throttle my requests, but of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t tell anybody. You know that they certainly they certainly wouldn’t tell the website owners. Those owners wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any idea what was going on and so for like a lot of the results would just be like oh overcast just can’t read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these feeds that everyone else can read and it took me months. They have some they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some kind of like good bot registration program where you could like register to be a good bot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could bypass some of these limitations. And it took months for me to get through that. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was able to find the right people and eventually I got it through. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people put their website behind Cloudflare, I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily understand all the technical ramifications of what they’re doing and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, potentially blocking things like, oh, we have this RSS feed or we have our podcast feed and we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to block a whole bunch of apps from accessing accidentally. I don’t think they intend for that necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or understand what they’re doing with that. So what’s very, very important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are what Cloudflare does by default and how Cloudflare brands what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do in the user interface. Because what happens a lot is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will think they’re going to, oh, I’ll block attacks to my site. Sure. Or I’ll make my CDN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost cheaper by by putting this in front of it, great. And they don’t realize what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is causing a lot of problems for smaller apps. And so when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read this, it was kind of unclear. Fortunately, it was not as bad as I expected. It was kind of unclear. It seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they were turning on AI crawl blocking across their entire network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default. That is not the case. They’re doing it only for newly registered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domains and they, apparently it’s gonna be part the onboarding flow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you are asked, do you want to block these or not? But it does, they’re not retroactively changing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their entire network, which is good because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing they brag about in their press releases that Cloudflare proxies 20% of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web. Okay? So think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the amount of power they have. And again, I can tell you from running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app that crawls a bunch of feeds from a bunch of websites, Cloudflare is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We use it too. We use it on ATP.fm. I use it for overcast. Like, it’s everywhere. And the reason why I use it is not for attack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, throttling. It’s because it’s a really cheap CDN. It’s like, it’s a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap, and that’s why a lot of people use it. Cloudflare has a lot of power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web. And what they just did was show us that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they actually did go a very, very small step further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and turn this on for all of the domains by default and not require an opt-in on all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old ones, they would be able to cut off crawling for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of different apps from 20% of the web in one move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the web works best when the power is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that concentrated. That was the whole point of the design of the web. If you accumulate a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of power over the web, the best thing you can do is shut up about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Never draw attention to yourself or how much power you have. And definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never overreach in a way that draws a lot of attention to the amount of power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have. And you can look at some various events over the last few years that show this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would this even possibly applies to Apple’s controversial CSAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanning plan where it’s like, oh, we’re just gonna do this on all your phones. What? You know, but you can also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple certainly gets it with like any controversial app store rejections. Where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, you can just declare an entire business won’t exist and it just won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s a lot of power. Hmm, let’s look at that. But you know, and with the web, you can, you can see see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it was last year, two years ago, when Google started invading pages that they have their login
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration with by putting the huge overlays saying, log in with your Google account, like right over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the page. They just turn that on one day. Like there was there was no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, checking with people. There was no consideration that like you’re literally just going to like turn your like little login
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embed into a giant thing that plasters over the page across thousands or millions of websites. Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just did that. They just turned that on because they felt like it and they wanted to use their numbers or whatever, whatever justification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they came up for it. They just did that and that showed, oh my God, they have way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much power here. Ooh, you know, um, you could also, you know, more recently, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, obviously the wordpress drama with Matt Mullenweg and that whole thing, like it’s like, oh, he has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of power over a lot of the web. Maybe we should change that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can even, I would even look at like, you know, in the current political atmosphere, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US has a lot of power over a lot of the web and a lot of the infrastructure around the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of other countries have been like, hmm, we used to be able to trust that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we can’t. Let’s start, you know, reducing that power. Let’s start diversifying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and taking control of our own stuff. Cloudflare has that level of power now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say Cloudflare has a level of power similar to the United States in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power over the internet. It is a huge entity. It controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge amount of traffic. That makes me very uncomfortable. A small group
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people now, a very small group of people, can now make decisions that can impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge swaths of how the web and how the internet and how internet-connected applications work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like that and that makes me very uneasy. They shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have as much power as they do and they just showed us how they could wield it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that, you know, they’re a giant stepping around and who knows what they’re going to step on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next. They came very close to stepping on something really big here and they don’t seem like they noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or cared or thought it was that big or thought it could be a problem. And ultimately where we’re heading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this, and this is not, you know, Cloudflare alone, This is kind of a problem with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rise of AI and the destruction of the search trade-offs, as we were saying earlier. But where we’re heading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this is the web used to be a place where anybody could really build anything or publish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything or build something that read things that were published and process them and different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web apps to read our test feeds and stuff like that or parse page content or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are heading to a point very rapidly now where that’s going to be over. That’s going to be shut down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have huge swaths of the web blocking crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from anything. Google search index maybe, but like, you know, it could block crawling from any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web apps you use. If you use something like, you know, IFTTT or Zapier or use some kind of automation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own curl scripts on your Mac. Not to mention, of course, things like RSS readers and podcast apps, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so many automations and automation apps and apps that parse data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off a website to do something, make a widget or something. We’re in an era now where those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all significantly at risk of not working anymore, because everyone’s gonna start locking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down their content and putting things like Cloudflare’s JavaScript thing in front of it, and so it’s gonna be harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and harder to make anything that interoperates with any of the rest of the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what that’s going to do is make it much harder for small projects and small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies and small developers to get their stuff off the ground and to have their stuff work. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the big companies, they’ll make deals. The big companies will be fine. Google will be fine. They will make deals with everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll work out fine for them. But people like us are at risk. And the tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we use, the tools we make, the businesses we run, the apps that we make, the apps that we use, those are all at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk as these giants stomp all over the internet. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am feeling very uneasy about all of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks, So part of my Docker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, swarm, not in a literal sense, I think that’s like a technical term in some context, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my array of Docker containers, one of them is this open source project, changedetection.io,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ll put a link in the show notes. I think I’ve talked about this once or twice recently. And what this lets you do is it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey periodically go and look at some webpage, you know, maybe because you’re trying to get an alert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, I don’t know, if the TS5 Plus is in stock at CalDigits website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is one of the times I most recently used this. And it’ll ping that website every minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every 10 minutes, every hour, every 10 hours, whatever you want, and send a little alert when it changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it even is smart in most cases with regard to stock, and it’ll actually parse out and realize, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s in stock, and send me a little push using pushover, what have you. I love this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I use it for cases where a website doesn’t have an RSS feed. And I’ve noticed in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month or so, and I never put it together until I heard you talking, despite having read about this a few days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last month or so, I’ve been getting a lot of 403 errors on things that I crawl.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re not critical, it’s not the end of the earth, but like silly things that I’d like to know when they’re updated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m getting 403s. And I was working on earlier today actually, trying to find a way to get around that. And a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people have said that the cloud flare, like, oh, are you a robot? Yes or no. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checkbox that I guess occasionally will give you a capture, but I almost never see that, that that could be causing a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that have developed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some workarounds that seem to not really work, which from Cloudflare’s perspective is great. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, it’s just a little, you know, dorky home labber that sucks. Like I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to very gingerly and lightly crawl these things. And apparently they can detect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a headless instance of Chrome is going after these things and they deny me. And that stinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it a big deal in my personal case? No, it’s nothing like what Marco was talking about, but it still sucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. and I kind of hate it. And maybe this isn’t the same thing. Maybe I’m conflating two very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different events. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s exactly the same thing, just a smaller scale. And that just shows the problems that Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creates by having so much power over so much of the web. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was first running into the problems crawling podcast feeds, I would email some of the big publishers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, hey, just so you know, Overcast can’t crawl your site because of what you’re saying. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to this settings, and the settings you’d have to go to would basically be like, turn off all protection, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was all scary and nobody would ever do it. And thank God I was able to get registered as like an okay bot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, it took me months. And maybe I was only able to do it because I was so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, bothersome to CloudFlare’s people and maybe because I already had an app that had a good number of users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I was just a nobody starting fresh today, could I do that? Probably not. I fear that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the era of the web is just collapsing in so many ways. Like, you know, it felt like it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be forever. It felt like it would be our entire lives where the web would be a healthy functioning place the way we always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew it. And I think it’s very much not already in lots of ways, and it’s just going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting locked down more and more. The last thing the web needs right now is to be made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse. The web is struggling in a lot of ways. Content on the web is struggling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Economics and the web are struggling, again, because of — largely because of AI, but also because social networks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and different pressures and different competition from video and stuff like that. There’s a lot going on. The only thing worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than publishing on the web right now is reading on the web. It’s really quite terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on so many levels. But the advantage of the web is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is much more interconnectable. You can build upon it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that you can’t build upon the app platforms nearly as openly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or nearly as flexibly. You can build things like browser plugins that will interact with other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco webpages. There’s different things. You can have servers, backends, and you crawl people’s APIs and process them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you were just saying. There’s ways you can build things on the web that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are simply impossible to do in the world of native apps, especially on phones. They’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locked down and isolated, and that is getting eroded. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what Cloudflare can do now, what they are already doing with their little bot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redirects, like you were just saying, and then now when they do something like start blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI crawlers by default, that’s dangerous. That can really start stomping on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things. That’s why we’re here on the web. The reason we do things on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of in native apps, is to have that kind of reach and flexibility and power. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that starts getting locked down, where you have to be a big company negotiating with everybody to get your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff to work at all with anybody else’s stuff, the web is dead. That’s killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the web is. So I really am fearful for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web, and I find myself mourning what we have lost, and hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can somehow preserve what’s left, and maybe get some of that back, but I don’t yet see a path forward
⏹️ ▶️ John You should probably be more scared of Google than Cloudflare, but the good thing about all of this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John because the web is a platform that nobody owns, even Google, technically.
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an avenue to, uh, like, essentially like if, uh, if the currently
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat benevolent, somewhat dictators, like the big companies, like Cloudflare, for example, like they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re big enough that they can cause a big problem. If they start causing a big problem and like the big companies need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John deals with them or whatever, it is actually technically possible for, to, it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John what you were saying with like the EU and everybody doing when they seeing that Apple is no longer in the Apple, that the U S is no longer a
⏹️ ▶️ John trustworthy actor. you have the ability to go off and splinter
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, okay, but we over here are gonna do our thing based on these same technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously there are things that big companies that can do to thwart that, in particular, if you control, let’s say, the world’s most popular web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John or the world’s most popular search engine, there’s a lot of things you can do to thwart that, but technically speaking, we do have
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of an out there and it is a somewhat competitive market. Cloudflare is not the only company that does what it does, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if it does something bad, in theory, its competitors could take advantage of it and yada yada. But anyway, all that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I saw this story briefly go by, immediately what I thought of is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Cloudflare saying that they’re going to, you know, they’re presenting this as we are
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re a tool that empowers people with websites to do things they couldn’t do on their own, like with standard DDoS attack
⏹️ ▶️ John and deal with bots and stuff like that. And we’re saying here, creators who are on the web, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you this new tool, we’ve heard that some of you don’t like these AI crawlers,
⏹️ ▶️ John taking your stuff and using it for their training. And it’s difficult for you to figure out how to stop that
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not like things on the web have a trustworthy way to identify themselves. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting at before. It’s like you can say in these things will block AI crawlers. But what does that even mean? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the type of thing that an individual small web developer has any chance of being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. How do I stop web AI crawlers? Well, you can’t it’s a really hard problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ John CloudFlare is this big, powerful company with tons of money. Let them take a crack at it. You already pay them for your
⏹️ ▶️ John CDN or whatever. Here’s a checkbox you can check will block AI crawlers. And this is a tool that you the
⏹️ ▶️ John web, you know, the website owner, you are empowered to do this for your website if you choose to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re giving you that tool. And this is the relationship you want. We’re being a good company by empowering
⏹️ ▶️ John creators. And I looked at it as saying, what you’re doing CloudFlare is constructing
⏹️ ▶️ John a situation such that if you are the middle party
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets paid to allow AI crawlers to access websites, you know what I mean? That’s basically what you were
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, Margo, is like, okay, if people enter into the situation and check the checkbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re checking is saying, I now allow Cloudflare to decide what is
⏹️ ▶️ John and isn’t a legitimate crawl. That’s always what they’re doing. But you assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that Cloudflare is benevolent and is actually deciding what is and isn’t legitimate crawler according
⏹️ ▶️ John to your understanding of that checkbox. So they’ll block the AI crawlers. Oh, but what if an open
⏹️ ▶️ John AI says, hey, we’ll make a deal with you Cloudflare and we’ll pay you a whole jillion dollars if you
⏹️ ▶️ John put us on the allow list. And so now we’re not counted as one of those bad AI crawlers. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s obviously the very first thing that will happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like, Cloudflare, wouldn’t it be great if instead of AI companies
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to crawl that content for free, instead they all had to pay Cloudflare?
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, that’d be great. Anyway, so this is like the worst case type of scenario. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John presuming that Cloudflare wouldn’t do this because part of their whole reputation and value proposition
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they are the defenders of the open web and all the things that you were talking about, Marco, or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always dangerous to be in a situation where you’re relying on the good graces of a very powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John company. We talk about that all the time with Apple and podcasts. Like if Apple sort of turned bad on podcasts, They could do
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of damage. So far so good, they haven’t, fingers crossed. But that’s a terrible situation to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in. Don’t rely on the kindness of giant companies with huge amounts of power.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not, you know, I think for the current leadership of Cloudflare probably
⏹️ ▶️ John has good intentions with this, like most of the things they do, as evidenced by how they’re rolling it out. But you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John one bad CEO away from all of this turning in a second, which is why structurally,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bad place to be. even if reality wise, you could say, oh, it’s fine. Everybody’s doing the right thing. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a good move or whatever. But like, I don’t want to be one bad CEO away
⏹️ ▶️ John from 20% of the web getting a man in the middle, you know, like collecting money
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for allowing AI crawl. Like it’s just, it’s not a good situation. So again, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John some, I take some solace in the fact that the technologies involved in the web and the way that those technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John evolve and already exist allows for some routing around
⏹️ ▶️ John of this. And it does require for a real doomsday scenario would require
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple ones of these big companies to sort of cooperate in a sort of pact of evil where Google
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees to change Chrome in a certain way and Cloudflare agrees to do this and so on and so forth. And historically, those
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies have been more at odds at each other than willing to do that. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the web in the end will probably be okay just because as it gets damaged
⏹️ ▶️ John and changes and morphs over time, it still finds a way like weeds in your yard to just find a new place
⏹️ ▶️ John to grow. But I would feel much more comfortable if we had a little bit more diversity than
⏹️ ▶️ John we do now. And how big is too big? Is 20% of the web too big? What is WordPress? What percentage of websites in the
⏹️ ▶️ John web run WordPress? It’s some other big number. Like 45 or something. Yeah, that’s probably also too big.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or at least too big to have any single person be able to influence that 40%
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that we had seen it was possible, right? And again, I’m heartened by the reaction to that, which is like, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we don’t want this to ever happen again. So let’s start figuring out how we can remove this
⏹️ ▶️ John single point of failure, single point of control. Can we, we don’t want that to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the case. And again, with Cloudflare, if they start sort of turning the screws or trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn on the money faucet, I would hope the reaction of everybody would be similar. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of, you know, I spent my entire career as a web developer. I have a lot of faith in the resilience of the web just
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve seen how it has gone in cycles from being screwed up and then
⏹️ ▶️ John coming back and being screwed up and then coming back. But yeah, when I see structures like this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, Marco, this brings attention to it. It was always the case. This is not like this is news. We’ve known Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ John is big, but as long as they’re just sitting there and not doing anything, you don’t think about it too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when they do stuff like this, everyone’s head comes up like a little prairie dogs, huh? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, again, with Apple Podcasts, I hope I never do anything to make us think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do something bad. But it would be better if this much power wasn’t concentrated
⏹️ ▶️ John in this few people. I think this is a general lesson of history and humanity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people. That never goes well. Even if it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s going well for decades or centuries, it always ends badly. and it is better to
⏹️ ▶️ John more widely distribute that power, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our weekly bonus topic, plus all of the other member exclusive and bonus content we do over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the year. Overtime is every episode, you get a bonus topic every episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week on Overtime, we’re talking about, Is copying Apple hardware a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of some new Pro Display XDR options? So we’re gonna talk about that in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will hear that if you join https://www.hp.fm.com/. Thank you so much everybody, and we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to, accidental Check podcast so
Marco solved sunscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have in the internal show notes the following for an aftershow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco solved sunscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I know what it is. You do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hats European sunscreen that has that chemical we’re not allowed to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just bought a new son I just bought a new Sun hat so it’s top of mind for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh anyway before you go any further Please send me the link for that partially because I am interested in it for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought yes partially because I’m interested in getting us on have but mostly because the entire internet will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ask for that
⏹️ ▶️ John me being me I bought two of them Because I didn’t know which one I would like better, but anyway, I’ll send you them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Oh my god. Okay, no Casey wins All right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, so I For a long time have had a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of trouble trying to get a sunscreen that doesn’t burn my eyes Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might think why don’t you just not put sunscreen in your eyes? eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like someone who has never been to the beach right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought a great idea and so I have been so diligent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in trying to try to tell like you know, wipe my arm on my face or things like that. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried like you know, wiping with handkerchiefs and have you tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right the other problem is you know sweat and gravity. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve just had a problem for years that like sunscreen just always finds a way to burn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my eyes even if I don’t even even if I don’t even have it on my face like even if it’s just like on my like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears and neck and stuff somehow if I make one little mistake if I touch something I touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow a little bit and then my eyes are burning for hours afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first I mean first I was like okay mineral sunscreen was the obvious solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the way sunscreens work is they they either have have chemicals that absorb into your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skin that themselves absorb UV rays so that they don’t burn you. Those are called chemical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreens. Mineral sunscreens basically are lotions that contain very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine metallic particles, usually zinc or titanium dioxide, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically reflect the sun off your skin as like a physical barrier that literally just reflects it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. They both have ups and downs. The main downside of mineral sunscreens, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’ve been using more recently, is first of all, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just putting metallic powder on you, it has to kind of stay a little bit goopy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Because otherwise the powder would just fall off of you. So you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of are a little bit tacky all day long. If you have it on your arms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you lean your elbow on a desk, you slide off. Like it’s that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of, if you like-
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t forget about leaving that sunscreen all over the interior of your car like your armrest it’s terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so any yeah anything you touch like if you I made I made the mistake of putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunscreen on my arms and neck and stuff mineral sunscreen and then a few minutes later putting a shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on of course it gets all over the shirt in the process of putting this you’re on it’s like okay that’s that shirts ruined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know next and you know yeah certainly if you like go into your car and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put your arm on the armrest in the car You’re gonna have a big stripe of white, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John goop. And here’s the thing just for people thinking about this. I know a lot of people use put this on their small children. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John put this stuff, physically, physical sunscreen, like physically block
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sun. Mineral sunscreen, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you put this on your children and let them loosen the backseat of your car, you will never get it clean. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is really hard to get, I’m telling you from experience, it’s really hard to get this off
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the interior, like the door cards, I don’t know if you, like the stuff that’s on the door, that plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John and material, even if you don’t have a fancy car, If you just have a cheap car and it’s plastic, you think, oh, anything comes off plastic real easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not this stuff. It’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and also, minimum sunscreen, it doesn’t burn my eyes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is a bunch of metallic powder, it does occasionally just get in my eyes, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like you have dust in your eyes. It’s also not great. It is, there are advantages, like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reef safe if you are swimming somewhere that requires reef safe sunscreen, like most of Australia. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reason why it’s out there, and it’s good for that, Like, it’s a pretty big set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who don’t go to the beach a lot, the one place you may have seen this in pop culture is if you ever see
⏹️ ▶️ John something on TV or movies and they show a lifeguard with a big white stripe down their nose, that is the most
⏹️ ▶️ John extreme case of physically blocking sun from getting to your nose by putting an opaque white
⏹️ ▶️ John substance on. Obviously, you’re not entirely covering your body like you’re a French mime or something with white stuff, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the extreme case of this. And seeing what little kids with the stuff on their body to the backseat, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John think their entire body was like the strip that you see on the nose of a lifeguard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And they are, I mean, to be clear, like you do get very white with mineral sunscreen, like, cause it is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coating you with white dust. And there are, there are tinted ones that like a lot of, they’re mostly used if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be putting, if you’re trying to like use it as like a foundation on your face and you’re going to be putting makeup over it. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like skin tone tinted mineral sunscreens that are coming various shades of brown and tan and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s, they all have the same trade offs of like you’re leaving dust all over everything. not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was thinking like when I was a kid, I had sunscreen all the time in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the summer and I never remember it burning my eyes. Like what what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was different back then? Maybe it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just mayonnaise. Wow. You’re from Ohio. I mean little kids, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, their son is young. Their cells reproduce quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent every summer in New York anyway. Um, which case he knows. Yep. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you should have been covering yourself with mosquito I mean we were also doing that to be to be clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what the best sunscreen in the world is Crisco because when you start sizzle you move your ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Louis black for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what happened is in the late 90s we started getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chemicals to do full spectrum blocking because the original chemicals when we were growing up in like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the 90s and 80s those chemicals didn’t block UV a they only blocked UV B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And once we learned that UVA was also bad and worth blocking, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to develop new chemicals. And the only chemical in the US that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco authorized by the FDA to block UVA and UVB is avobenzone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sunscreens when we were kids didn’t contain this. Well, avobenzone is now in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US chemical sunscreen. The only sunscreens in the US that don’t contain it are the all mineral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. So, avobenzone is very effective at blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UVA and UBB, but is known to cause severe eye irritation in lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people. And so sure, and this is why, and I went through every,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I must have, especially at the Beach House, I have 10 different brands of sunscreens. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’ve tried to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, you didn’t, like I figured like your first YouTube search would have thrown like Korean sunscreen in your face. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t come up in your searches when you’re buying 10 US only sunscreens?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I didn’t realize there was a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, did you Google for it once? Like I can’t, I’m getting, I’m constantly getting the, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe my algorithm is different than yours, but I don’t even have an interest in these things and I have literally
⏹️ ▶️ John watched, anyway, go on. I’m surprised that you were able to find and purchase 10
⏹️ ▶️ John US sunscreens without having non-US sunscreens thrown in your face by every algorithm on the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, well, because most of where I was looking was stores and Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, the second I involved ChatGPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you could just use Google and you would have the same thing, or YouTube. Yeah, but it would have taken a lot longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you could have just written sunscreen, ice thing. As soon as I involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ChatGPT, I very quickly found out, oh, here, like I basically, I said something like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, my eyes burn my sunscreen, what should I do? You know, what are my options? And it gave me the whole readout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the different chemicals and what they do and why they’re there and what are the trade-offs. And it said, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other countries, including countries with very strong regulatory agencies like the EU and Japan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know the EU’s not a country, forgive me, like EU and Japan, like, oh, they have strong regulatory agencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they allow more chemicals than the US does. Apparently, the process of getting them approved in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US for sunscreen is apparently onerous and burdensome and terrible and so nobody can really get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ones approved. But other countries have solved this problem with newer chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have chemical sunscreen and therefore none of the downsides of mineral sunscreens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but chemicals that just don’t sting your eyes. And so I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, how do I acquire chemicals? These obviously Amazon doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I’m like, well, if only there were some kind of electronic Bay that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would include things from other countries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you sure Amazon doesn’t have them? I can imagine you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find them. Oh, I’ve looked. They probably do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, maybe. Although, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you get that or a thing full of Crisco is up in the air, like the AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And B&H does not sell international sunscreen, unfortunately. But I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on eBay and I found a couple of recommendations from my glorious chat GPT research.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, John, that’s right. And I got two recommendations, or I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got three different options delivered over the last week and I’ve been using them every day. Like different, like, oh, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try option A on my legs, option B on my arms, you know, that kind of, and like doing all these tests,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had zero irritation, none. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s night and day difference to the point where now I’m actually like wearing sunscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, which I, you know, most of us really should. I’m wearing sunscreen more now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of those downsides are gone. And I also thought like, you know, if I’m going to be ordering like sunscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the EU or Japan or something like it’s going to take weeks to get here or whatever. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are like us sellers on eBay that have huge stocks of these. It says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than 10 available like that, you know, that kind of eBay seller and you can just buy like four of them if you want. Who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares? Like, you know, I, I have solved it. The U S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assumed we would have the same option as everyone else. I was so wrong. And I will put in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the link to my two favorite ones. One of them is, forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, La Roche-Posay. It’s like this fancy French, I think, brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have one, the UV Mune 400, and that one is fragrance-free, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s expensive, though, because these are European, so they’re tiny and expensive. And then my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall favorite is Skin Aqua Super Moisture UV Gel from Japan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll put them both in the show notes that runs about 20 bucks a bottle. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally fine. It just works. 20 bucks a bottle, a little steep. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, it’s a Japanese sunscreen that I’m importing through an eBay seller. Give me a break.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got some Japanese toothpaste that way to try it. I wasn’t a fan. I’ll put a link in the show notes to one of the things that I just pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John out of my YouTube history about Australian sunscreen which also has lots of uh as with all these things
⏹️ ▶️ John for the many years that they’ve been bouncing around like you’ll see tiktoks about them everything it’s always like the sunscreen that
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want you to know about and this youtuber is taking advantage of the same
⏹️ ▶️ John fad or whatever but actually goes into a little bit of detail and did kind of a unscientific personal test
⏹️ ▶️ John with different kinds but they do go into the most of the things you just described about the UVA versus UVB
⏹️ ▶️ John and reef safe and SPF levels and all the all the myths and the realities of like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ll see very often is like in Australia, you know, they have the real sunscreen that works better. This isn’t so much about icing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about like, oh, US sunscreen isn’t actually blocking the sun. But because Australia, there’s so much sun, they have much better
⏹️ ▶️ John sunscreen than we have. And we can’t get the good Australian sunscreen here. And anyway, this is a pretty good video. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John blue lizard. It’s a it’s a long video about it. But but it includes lots of details. And part
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is what you said, like our regulations are crappy. It’s the same reason we couldn’t have matrix LED headlights
⏹️ ▶️ John for so long, although that’s finally changing. Like we’re not great at regulations and those things. But part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it is also that there are actually different trade-offs with the demo chemicals they use in every country. It has their own
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they’re super paranoid about and their own things that they don’t care about. And then I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say that on this whole topic of like, buying, it’s not a healthcare product, but like buying anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna be like rubbed onto your skin from like eBay or a sketchy
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon seller or whatever, there’s always some inherent risk there. I mean, there’s risk buying, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John American sunscreen as well, but like, I don’t know, it depends on how much you
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the eye stinging versus wearing a hat versus not going outside versus all those other things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I and of course $20 a bottle is also a bit of a deterrent. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this, obviously what we should have here, with the Matrix LED headlights is we should change our regulations to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John these things in the US and solve this problem. Because I’m sure US manufacturers would love to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell us a new kind of sunscreen that they can advertise as not stinging your eyes because they all would advertise that
⏹️ ▶️ John and presumably they would sell it for less than $20 a bottle. But in the meantime, if you’re desperate,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other countries have it, you can find it in various places. Did you check Canada that might be easier than
⏹️ ▶️ John getting it from Japan? Maybe you can find some way to get it from
⏹️ ▶️ John Canada through somewhat shady means that will cost you less money than $20 a bottle. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously, well, at first I was just buying on eBay just to try it out, but I was like, it wasn’t that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a deal because these are coming from, the Japanese one came from Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The French one came from Columbus, Ohio, where I’m from. So it’s like, it arrived in like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. So it’s not really a hassle to buy it on eBay. When you think about eBay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, eBay has, you know, randos like me occasionally selling some weird thing, but like most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sellers on eBay now are like professional sellers like it’s it’s not that different from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really like Amazon is a collection of a whole bunch of third party sellers. So is eBay and it’s many of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. So it’s not like eBay has grown a lot from where it started and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s now just kind of a general purpose shopping site in addition to auctions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did any of your sunscreen smell like cigarettes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s super professional like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything my main
⏹️ ▶️ John fear with eBay is that everything I buy on eBay will smell like cigarettes. I’ve been having good luck I’ve been buying lots of mice to try to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with my mouse situation None of them smell like cigarettes so far, so I’m doing good. Yeah cigarettes or cats That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the other one. Yeah, well I avoided one of them because it has some minor yellowing I’m like I know that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, honestly. I could say like getting it like You’re you’re right obviously there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risks with buying stuff from you know unknown sources, but like is Is healthy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center 84 on eBay that much less credible than whatever the hell goes into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon’s warehouses? Like I don’t know. I don’t I don’t think it’s that different to be honest You know when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the overall risk profile of like I have not been wearing sunscreen most days Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summer even when it’s bright outside I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say that when you said oh when we were growing up in the 80s and 90s is the sunscreen we use well We grew up in the 70s
⏹️ ▶️ John the sunscreen we use was none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but like you know like the copper tone that I grew up using like it was not it was not using a lot of benzone. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was using whatever you know weird chemicals came before that and they might have had downsides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they didn’t burn my eyes. So I would use sunscreen whereas you know in the modern era I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never wear sunscreen because I hate it so much because it’s either I burn my eyes or I cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything in dust and feel goopy all day and I can’t even cross my legs because they slide apart like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s there’s so many trade offs with mineral and everything else like so if it makes a difference, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to wear sunscreen or not, then you’re also greatly reducing a lot of risks on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. So I’m choosing to take the risk of healthy center eighty four on ebay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of you know skin cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m interested in your idea that it doesn’t sting some people’s eyes. Doesn’t that a chemical sting all human
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes like is there some person out there who’s like no it doesn’t bother my eyes at all. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta if it bothers everyone else as as much as it bothered me. I don’t know why anybody would ever wear sunscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s like the soap tasting cilantro thing or whether it’s true or myth or whatever, but like, I honestly, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine sunscreen with this chemical going into someone’s eye and them not
⏹️ ▶️ John noticing it. But maybe, you know, everyone thinks their own experience is the same. Like, yeah, I am very familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ John the ice thing of which you speak. And yeah, if you want to avoid it,
⏹️ ▶️ John be very diligent about not sweating through your eyebrows and reapplying,
⏹️ ▶️ John rewashing and reapplying, or wear a hat on your head and sunscreen everywhere else, or yeah, find some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even the diligence isn’t always enough, because these chemicals migrate. They actually, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can move across your skin. Like, you just can’t have it anywhere near your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face. Like, that’s why, it’s just, oh my God, the rest of the world has us solved. Like, the answer is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a Benzo, that’s the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my eyebrow mopping usually works for me. Beep, beep, beep.